Between the breakfasts of cigarettes and coffee and the nights feeling homesick, between the red marks on lunar calendars and hankerings for red meat, there were stories and ceremonies, apologies and accidents, waning and waxing,alpha and omega.

Prompt: #178: Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.-Eric Hoffer.

Summary: Between the breakfasts of cigarettes and coffee and the nights feeling homesick for a place they've never seen, between the red marks on lunar calendars and hankerings for red meat, there were stories and ceremonies, apologies and accidents, waning and waxing, alpha and omega.

A/N: Originally this was supposed to be my entry for the nextgendarkfest but I dropped out because there was no way I could finish it the way I wanted to finish it in the time I had to write it. It turned out better I think than I planned. Thanks go out to stormsandsins for the help with the French.

"And the owlet whoops to the wolf below"

4 Days until the New Moon

The weather was damp and frigid and he'd known if he didn't show his face that it would have seemed odd to Uncle Harry if Victoire happened to not show too.

Odd enough to send people out to his flat.

People like Harry Potter that could as easily case a room as he could draw a breath, and know that the deep scratches left in the wood hadn't come from rearranging furniture but from it being thrown across the room or someone's nails digging in.

People like Charlie Weasley that would dig through his garbage and find an empty tin that now only held the tiniest of crumpled withered bits of monkshood stalk in it.

People like Bill Weasley that scented sex and pheromones and blood and sweat as if they were his own in the air, engrained in the wood, on skin.

Teddy kept his distance and came early enough to make his walk in the drizzly horrid weather seem like a distraction from hunger when told that dinner wasn't ready yet, as if he hadn't already known and planned for it.

And it wasn't that someone besides him was outside that surprised him, but who it was and how they perched themselves on a wet wooden bench as if their arse wouldn't be soaked through thoroughly by the time they got up did manage to stop him from trying to walk off the scent of her from his skin.

She sat like some out of place doll, forgotten and forlorn, a toy left out in the rain to muster slowly and coldly.

Dominique was nothing like her sister, perpetually crass and brash, big eyes and small lips that puckered like an albino koi irritated that it was stuck in a pond so small, spring curled, and loose-limbed.

Where Victoire was tanned like someone who'd only ever had winter sun on her skin, Dominique was ivory like she'd only ever known starlight in summer. Where Victoire had hair like matte platinum, Dominique had glossed gold. Where Victoire tapered, Dominique straightened and the other way round. Victoire liked her walls, Dominique preferred her spaces.

So in the rain she sat out and stared at water spilling over the leaves of an already dead rhododendron bush in a frilled dress and jumper with a braided belt and her curls weighted by raindrops, her shoes water-logged and the tops of her feet muddy.

"Quit starin', ya fecking git," her smile was big enough for him to see half of it from where he stood. He turned his head but didn't walk away.

"Sorry. You just looked odd."

She stared out at him, she had wider eyes than her sister but they narrowed in a similar fashion. He turned in her direction.

"She's a right twat, so either you're fecking dumb or fecking weak."

He knew he should have been offended but he was devoid of anything to make emotion out of, he was too drained of the inherent will to hold onto any feeling or opinion.

Dominique huffed and blew out wetly, whipping her face forward to stare at the dead flower bush.

" Whydja even let her do it? Now she's gonna come and collect, you do know that right?" Her eyes moved but her chin stayed level and high. Teddy felt that he was without answers, a coupled emptiness associated with his emotional drabness.

"Yeah, figured you'd have no fecking clue what I meant. Just so you're not surprised, she ain't so nice, and she ain't 'walks softly' and all that tripe. You'll probably end up in Mungos after you go see her."

There was something malicious in the small girl. Dominique was jagged, Victoire was hard. Her chest heaved once, twice; the air was cold and harsh.

"Not 'cause she's angry but cause she gets real mean, times like these," she continued as if pointing out a well-known fact.

"It happens and that's why I think she doesn't mind if you get out what you need to get…out with her during the full moon. But she does it so you feel like you deserve what's coming, and what's comin' is her ripping your arms off most like," she shrugged and frowned in his direction, tipping her chin at an angle so he could see both her eyes squinted and tilted high to throw him into her line of sight.

"But I'll give you a tip: she wants you to fight, and she wants you to want to fight and get torn up. She wants to do for you what you'd do for her, or other way round," the eyes that had been watching him shifted and she let her chin drop and her curls fall around her face in a damp heap for a few moments, looking for words.

She propped an elbow on a knee and her jaw in the cupped palm and let her head roll sloppily at him, child-like and sullen.

"Give and take and all that. She doesn't have anyone but you to do that with."

And for a moment the younger girl sounded especially bitter. Jealous. He felt his forehead draw up and his eyes take on a confused squint.

"Why do you care what Victoire does to me?"

"I don't care, not a bit, but she's my sister and she deserves what she wants. And she's already chosen you as what she wants; she chose you a long time ago."

A door slammed. Teddy snapped his head towards the sound, Dominique let her head tilt back and her face stop the rain until he returned to the conversation.

"Everyone was thinking it and watching it happen, but they really didn't actually ever expect it to happen," she told him when he didn't look back quick enough.

"Everyone except you." It was as much of a question as anything else he might have said.

"Well, her and me may be as different as night and day but we're a pair and I know her like I know where my nose is even when I close my eyes."

"You don't like that she chose me."

"What?" She looked underwhelmed.

"You're jealous."

With an absolute aghast expression she stayed frozen in indignation for more than a moment, enough for Teddy to realize he had guessed wrong and deeply offended the young girl.

"Oh get over yourself. Yeah, I'm jealous but only 'cause she's already made her choice. You're it, Teddy. It's hard to be a kid and watch everything happen to everyone else and know that you still have to sit around and wait."

"Yeah? Who are you waiting for?" He asked knowing he was being snide and wanting her to know. He did not like being questioned by someone who he thought thought of themselves as being allowed to say things that she was saying.

She seemed to ponder the question very seriously.

"I'm waiting for…myself, really. I guess. I just…, sometimes I think it'd be lovely to go off by myself and just go solo out into the world and be completely alone, have real solitude." She swung her feet and let her head move as if tracking something with her eyes, she kept talking.

"It's hard to watch someone who's like that find someone who's their equal to have a kind of solitude with. The type that only two people who are perfectly right for each other can have."

"You think a lot."

"I always think, because I can't always do. Ya know? And Victoire I think plays at things and it gets me angry, because it's like she's faking at something that is supposed to be natural. And then I feel happy that she can't do something as well as me."

She gave herself a small private smile at the sentiment.

"But you're jealous."

Her curls swung arcs of water around her face when she turned her face to look at him.

"Bet your arse I am. I just want to get what Victoire has with you, with someone, one day. Some people say I'm too picky but really I'm not going to waste my time and settle for something I don't want when all I have to do to get it is be patient. I can wait, but sometimes when you find something you've wanted you don't have any use for it, you're too tired to really care enough anymore. It gets lonely. Sometimes."

Teddy felt the urge to start walking again, that the conversation had come to a close.

"I just think that you should know that you shouldn't feel so bad at doing whatever you did, or how you did it because my sister isn't stupid. I think you need to go have a chat with her and yell at her because she always thinks she has a right to pull this type of bullshit, and really everyone lets her. And I just think it isn't fair that no one really tells you any of this, no one to give you any insight."

Teddy placed his hands in the pockets of his jumper and tried not to smile dumbly at the idea of yelling at Victoire.

"Anything else?"

A grin took over the whole of her face, uncontrollable and appling her cheeks into round firm mounds.

"Yeah, don't walk in papa's direction with the wind at your back. He might decide to fecking murder you. Hard. Do you know what's for dinner?"

"Yeah. Lamb."

"Ehh. I hate lamb. Guess I'm eating scabs and sage derby."

"That's disgusting."

"You rutting my sister is disgusting to the majority of the dinner table but that doesn't mean you don't find it savory." Her teeth trailed over her bottom lip in a way that seemed obscene to him, not sexual just violent, disturbed.

Instead of letting an expression take over his face he turned and asked if she planned on sitting in the rain or coming inside to eat.

She hopped up and trotted off ahead of him, tiny and precise in her steps she twirled and walked slowly backwards swaying loosely in her distraction of trying to say something that she couldn't give words to.

He stopped to give her a chance to ask but she just opened her mouth, shook her head, and kept walking backwards until they were too far apart to talk to each other anyway, she stopped, looked over her shoulder, turned and looked around.

Teddy Lupin could honestly say he'd never at anytime expected to be thrown backwards by a well-approximated and aimed spell cast by a little girl.

Dominique Weasley laughed loud and brassy; she bobbed back at him and brandished her wand at his head.

"Ready?"

"…for what?" He growled out, angry and confused.

"Volatile Oil Bomb, oh don't make that face. Volatile as in evaporation not blow up. I wouldn't blow you up or set you on fire. I'm not mixed in the head. Dummy."

"What does it do?"

"Make's you not smell like you fucked my sister."

She grinned.

"What will it make me smell like?"

"Nothing. Gonna do it now."

She threw a globe at his chest, it cracked and splashed and dissipated in a fog that gelled first and then wavered out like heat. It stung, he hissed.

"Though you said it wouldn't hurt."

Already walking away she just rolled her eyes.

"I said I wouldn't set you on fire, or blow you up. I never said or will ever say that I won't deliberately hurt you, or try to. Get up you're playing in mud like a baby."

"You're a brat."

"I am. This I do not deny," she looked pleased and indignant at the same time with her answer, Teddy smiled at her and got up off the ground, fingers slipping in the mud gathering under his nails.

There was clanging and a distant voice calling everyone to dinner.

"Mama isn't here. Victoire isn't here. I guess that means I have to sit at the big table tonight."

"Lucky you."

"I don't like to eat at the table. Everyone else eats so slowly, after I finish the only thing to do is watch everyone eat. It's so bloody boring."

"You stranger than you're sister."

"Heh. Thanks. I hope Uncle George shows up I have loads of ace ideas to go over for the shop."

"You should show him that stuff you just used on me," he joked.

"I did, he says I have to come up with a less negatively connotated name for it."

"Did he actually say that?"

"You sound like Uncle Ronald. In so many words yes, that is exactly what he said, disregarding those exact words," she beamed at him and climbed the back steps of the burrow.

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